Th Zen of the Hurt Locker

January 3, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

We’re talking about the movie Hurt Locke tonight, the movie as metaphor. What is the Hurt Locker? This movie is disguised Buddhism because the Hurt locket is Duhkha of the suffering of life that is fragmented by choices, fragmented by divisions and complexity. Hurt Locker is about the simplicity of war because here there are no choices; just on or off, life or death. But do we have to go to war and deconstruct bombs in order to be free of the Hurt Locker?

I’ve spent the last few days throwing out my accumulated choices, all the past stuff I’ve saved and stored because there was only incoming and no outgoing in my office. So there was a bunch of clean-up energy that rises at the end of the year. Restoring order is the way we simplify our lives, Choices like cereal brands have a way of multiplying. We can’t get down to the simple on/off ground of life. When you get down to ON/OFF you have no choice but to be ON, to choose life. Life is not divided at this level. There is no Hurt at this level.

The Hurt comes from divisions of life into choices. When you have to choose, you create the Chooser. And the Chooser is a fictitious person, someone who chooses. When you get down to ON/OFF, there is no Chooser. There is no on separate from the choice because life cannot be divided into a choice. You are not making a choice, like a potter makes a pot, you are the choice.

And this takes us back to our discussion on Time. When you get down to the Hurt Locker, you are not a chooser in time making a choice in time (choice requires time), you ARE time. There is nothing outside of time. There is no you outside of Time to make a choice.

But, remember our previous talk when we looked at horizontal time and vertical time. Horizontal time is making a choice to catch a bus or not. In Vertical Time you are what you do. This is Primary Time, timeless time, while making a choice to catch a bus is secondary time. The Metaphor Hurt Locker contains these opposites and as metaphor generates energy through the tension of the opposites, energy you need to make the leap from horizontal time to vertical time…which is not a choice.

Hurt Locker isn’t done with me yet. What was the meaning of that bomb suit he kept putting on? The movie ended with him going back to Iraq and wearing the bomb suit with a smile, walking alone down the road to meet his destiny. What did that bomb suit remind me of? A nagging question. I like nagging questions. They melt my mind like a hot penny.

It’s the armor of the Samurai Warrior! Ah, here’s the Zen of it. The Samurai of ancient Japan was a spiritual vocation through the art of war. Martial arts and zen went together as it was a surrender to the Force or the Tao. The personal identity was dissolve in the present moment encounter with death. For the Samurai death and life were One. In the union of death and life, you felt most alive. The Hurt was gone.

Now I work with the separate adventures our Samurai warrior undergoes in the movie. For a movie to unlock it deeper meaning every scene is an important ingredient, just like each island Odysseus lands on is a chain in the whole epic. Everything links together to make the whole chain snap into your mind. Seeing is revelation when the whole snaps into place.

I need to watch the movie again. This is the way you work with a Zen Koan. It nags you. You have to find the detonator that is the key.

The Zen of The Crown

January 3, 2018 by admin Leave a Comment

This year I’m going to wear the “crown” I’ve been given. We’re talking about the Netflix series the Crown and it’s the martini I’m high on right now. So this year I’m sticking to what I love best, which is exploring the layers of the movies that interest me. Our passion is our gift. Whatever you are interested in for no other reason than your interest is your gift. It is that which you must share for the very reason that you have no reason to get anything from it. Wear your Crown. It is your God given duty to wear the gift. you have been given, whatever it is. And we all have gifts. Everyone of us got a Xmas gift from God, and if we don’t open it and play with it, we are like the Duke of Windsor who rejected his gift and spent his whole life in regret, playing cards in Bermuda, in exile like Napoleon.

So wear you Crown, you gold gift that was given you to by God, or if you don’t like that word, your True Nature. You wear your gift, which means share your gift for no other reason than it gives you pleasure to play with it. You play with your gift, and because it’s given by God, your gift keeps on giving. God’s gift is your potential. You don’t know what it is going to be unless you open the box. Shrodenger’s Cat in the Big Bang.

When you open your gift on Christmas morning—every moment is Christmas morning in God’s time—you open the Christ Child in your heart, the child of potential and wonder and growth. So here I’m pulling apart the cotton ball of the Crown…I don’t know what the Crown means, so I ask it to reveal itself to me.

“Wear the Crown” is my interpretation of the Netflix The Crown. Wear what is given to you. We are all given conditions to work with: health, body, circumstance, position, you name it, all is given. This is our Crown, in the same way the royal family is given the gifts of royalty. But we are all royalty. Watching the series you realize that being a royal is not guarantee of happiness. The crown also brings the weight of great misery. You can’t even dress yourself. Being a king or queen is like being separated from your body. You have servants as your extended body….oh, wait..

Our marvelous technology today is a material replication of the royals servants. The average middle class person is treated as royalty by the technology you can afford. Where you use to crank something, you now push a button. Everywhere the intention is to remove us from the burden of our physical bodies. In the future we can just all sit on our throne and operate the world with one finger. The promised land is not so promising when you look at the Crown.

In our world only brides get treated as the Queen for a few hours. But for the Queen, it’s everyday the ceremony.

We all ask the question at some point in our lives: What is my role. What is my purpose. What is my service. Our life defines how we answer that question, which is always a comeback question, one that drives us to evolve. There seems to be no end to this question because the purpose of our life is to evolve, to transcend our roles. A role without a question becomes a ritual. The great problem is to—given that me must accept roles in life—how do we enliven our roles. How do we give them flesh and blood? Life is ritual. We live in routines at work and at home. How do we keep our selves fresh and alive in our given routines? We can’t escape routines and patterns because life functions in patterns. And the conditions of our historical moment determines what routines and patterns are available to us. As the Crown points out, even the routine of being Queen is a tremendous bore.

The Zen of Mission Impossible movies

October 23, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Zen and Mission Impossible III. We pull apart the cotton ball of Mission Impossible moves to find the spiritual seed inside. All movies are a spiritual seed, some bigger than others, of course, but All is One. In this talk we are looking as Simplicity and how the simple plan will collapse into complexity which awakened the Simple Man of action. The Plan is in time; the Hero, the Lion’s Roar is timeless. No plan can be perfect; but human action can be perfect when it is atonement with the world.

The Hero (Tom Cruise’s character) is always reduced to pure action and his single-minded intention. As usual, the heroic action is activate then the hero’e lover is stolen. Now its personal. Restoring the One that has been fragmented is now the cosmic One of Male/Female, the One that is Two.

The Hero is now in that existential battle with the Evil One who is challenging the Son of Man for the Right to be the One. But the Evil One is always about being in control of the World, of the Many. While the Heroic One, is only interested in control of himself, of restoring his own Unity as the One.

In retrying Unity of the One Man, the heroic also simultaneously restores Unity to the. Many (world). They are ONE..man/world. The Mission Impossible is to restore unity through the ONE instead of controlling the many, which is the Plan in Time, to restore Unity as plan for the future. The Evil One has the strength of intellect. The Heroic Man has strength of Intention. Through his Intention of being the One Man, the True Man, he has what his foil does not have. TIMING. Nature works with him to restore balance. All the Evil One has is his intellect and his plan.

But the Evil One’s Plan aways fails because his plan cannot predict and control the creativity of the Heroic Man, who is representative of Life itself. The Plan cannot control and predict Life. The Lion’s Roar of the Heroic Man is when he surrenders to Life….which we can say is God. Only through that surrender of the Plan does God work with Man to restore Life and Unity.

The Zen of James Bond

October 23, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

Well, I hope viewers can relate to this because who hasn’t seen a James Bond movie? The movies roller coaster ride of special effects and edge of your seat suspense notwithstanding, the theme of the Mythic Hero is what persists and gives the series its longevity. The formula or recipe creates many meals. The opening scene at the Mexican celebration of the walking dead seems appropriate and symbolic after the movie. During the intense movie it is not easy to pick up on the symbolic meaning. You cannot connect the dots until you have seen the whole movie.

But Bond is the Walking Dead. He is not afraid of death because he is already dead. He has already surrendered to Life, and life and death are not separate. We try to separate life from death and have only life and no death, but they cannot be separated. The closer death comes, the more alive we are. Bond dances on the razor’s edge. And we dance with him.

Movies are myths and myths come alive when we reenact them. Movies are myths and the movie myth comes alive when we watch it. After the movie is over the myth is dead, but during the movie we are live in the myth. We are the movie and the movie is us. Myths and movies are also dreams. But a dream has the ability to wake us up from our waking dream.

When we make the movie myth conscious, then the movie dream has the power to awaken us. The myth and dream are unconscious, and when we go into the theater, we suspend consciousness, we suspend the separate ego and become the movie. Then when the movie is over, we look at our watch and leave the theater back in our everyday dream. There is a moment, however, when we don’t know which is real, the movie or my waking world. If we could be enter that space, that zone between the real and the unreal, we would awaken to That which includes both the real and unreal, the conscious and unconscious. Can we walk that razor’s edge? Can we awaken from the dead?

All the great myths of humanity are gone. All the great masters are gone. All those that created great religions are gone. Western rationalism has white the slate clean. As Joseph Campbell said; Man is in free fall now. All we have left is the movies. But even here we don’t know why to decipher the enigma code. We have lost our creative imagination and all we have left is fantasy and subjective opinion. Machines can operation on the material world but we certainly can’t. If you want control over matter, create a machine. Your own mind is powerless. The irony is that it is our mind that creates the machine. But then we become dependent upon the mechanic.

Lion (movie review)

October 21, 2017 by admin Leave a Comment

For me all ways are the Buddha Way, and all movies are extended metaphors of the Way Home. The legend and teaching of the Buddha are the Way Home that is driven by the sense of a Paradise Lost. Because we live in a space/time world that is mapped linearly from here to there, we believe we have to get somewhere to find our Home. And the Lion was a story about finding home at a particular location. However, the emotional story of the movie, the story that you as the viewer feels is Here. The movie is Home. The movie as metaphor is your home, at least while you are traveling in the journey of the movie.

Here is where we have to make the shift from the objective (the movie) to the subjective (you as the center, you as the movie). Just as the hero in the movie had to remember his Home when he came upon the Indian food he remembered in the streets with his brother, when the smell reminded him like the perfume of a lost lover, we have remembrances of our lost home.

We human beings are wanderers in search of Home, that mystical place where we are absolutely OK, where there are no apologies, that place where we belong. There is no feeling that can substitute for it authentically, but so many products and beliefs are sold as pacifiers when this longing is awakened. This longing for the lost mother is universal. For the child the Mother and the World and the child are One. And so we search for our lost unity with the world.

In the movie the little boy is snatched from abject poverty and dropped into unimaginable luxury of our everyday middle class world. And yet, he still didn’t feel at home with all these substitutes, with this artificial paradise.

Th Zen of the Hurt Locker

The Zen of The Crown

The Zen of Mission Impossible movies

The Zen of James Bond

Lion (movie review)

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